Chatter is a powerful collaboration tool that has the potential to revolutionize your internal and external communications. Chatter is a native feature of Salesforce and is available to any client on the platform. Once nonprofits develop a few of their own use cases, they find Chatter to be a valuable addition to their daily toolset.

Chatter showed up on The Connected Cause in this post and some of the points we made then deserve to be restated here.

Chatter allows fund raisers to “follow” records, which means automatic updates whenever something changes on a record you care about. This is something that many fund raisers have been dreaming about for years.

Chatter usage can be freely extended to people in your organization who don’t normally access Salesforce, and also with anyone outside the organization. This is a great way for organized group communication without relying on complicated e-mail chains.

Chatter enables collaboration between people in the organization, with the benefit that all the history of the conversations and decisions is automatically kept in the CRM system. No more worrying about how to attach an e-mail, or copy in your notes.

To learn more about Chatter and all things NGO Connect, download our white paper here:

CRM implementation should be modeled like a fundraising campaign – a CRM deployment is not all boring techie geek stuff; it really an excuse to modernize and change your entire business. And like fundraising, a CRM campaign has phases: a silent phase, a public phase and “done but let’s talk about what’s next.”

Today’s topic is the public phase. First, you should create a communications plan bearing in mind that you can and will adjust as you go along. Be flexible. You want to get buy-in from your various stakeholders and end users at the onset and as you go along; if you need to change your communications, do it. You have to be part of the change management yourself.

Congratulations! Your change management campaign is well underway. You’re in the process of executing your communication plan, your team is motivated, and you are not slacking on reporting. Now it is time to set time lines and set strategic guard rails.

Well, the end of year is near! As we get closer to saying goodbye to 2014, many nonprofits are in the process of finalizing and executing their year-end fundraising campaigns. Deadlines are looming, task lists are long and resources may be limited. But, never fear! The team at iATS Payments has created this collection of blog post resources to help inspire, motivate and inform you as you tackle your end-of-year fundraising campaigns.

It always starts innocently enough: one of our clients smartly recognizes that their financial records are the most reliable data source for donors and constituents, and asks how to sync this to their CRM. This request happens almost on a weekly basis, from organizations of all sizes, using all manner of back office systems (QuickBooks, Peachtree, Great Plains and more). The motivation behind this request is typically to achieve these two clear benefits:

So far, we have covered everything from planning and involvement to executing a successful CRM Change Management Plan. “Data-driven decisions”, “360-degree view”, and “improved reporting” are all popular reasons we hear for organizations adopting CRM. For many of you, reporting is one of the most difficult parts of the project to do well, and it can be tempting to push it off in the timeline and say you’ll come back to it later.